President Trump and the leaders of Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar signed a document on the Gaza ceasefire deal during a summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on Monday.
“It’s going to hold up,” President Trump said as he signed the document, which has not been made public. The president didn’t share details about the document except to say it included “a lot of rules and regulations and lots of other things, and it’s very comprehensive.”
The signing ceremony came after Hamas released all 20 remaining Israeli captives and Israel freed nearly 2,000 Palestinians, including about 250 who were serving sentences and 1,700 who were captured in Gaza and held without charges.
While many details still need to be worked out through negotiations, and there are signs that Israel may restart its genocidal campaign, Trump’s message in Egypt and in his address to the Israeli Knesset earlier in the day was that the “war is over.”
More than 20 world leaders attended the summit in Egypt, but Israel and Hamas were not represented. According to a report from The Guardian, Trump planned to invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but the plan was aborted after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he wouldn’t attend if the Israeli leader was there. Sources told AFP that pressure from Iraq also prevented Netanyahu from attending.
During the summit, Trump told reporters that many of the leaders who attended want to join the so-called “Board of Peace,” a body Trump will chair to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza. He also said that the reconstruction hinges on Gaza’s demilitarization.
“We’ve all agreed that supporting Gaza must be done to lift up the people themselves, but we don’t want to fund anything having to do with the bloodshed, hatred, or terror, as has happened in the past,” Trump said. “We’ve also agreed that Gaza’s reconstruction requires that it be demilitarized and that a new, honest civilian police force must be allowed to create safe conditions for the people in Gaza.”
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said that the Gaza ceasefire deal represents the “last chance” for peace in the region. Egypt has been pushing the US to deploy troops to Gaza as part of a “peacekeeping” force, something US military officials have said wouldn’t happen, although the US has sent about 200 troops to Israel to monitor the ceasefire.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty told The Associated Press on Monday that Egypt wants “American engagement, even deployment on the ground, to identify the mission, task, and mandate of this force.”
